


Webs of Irony

by icarus_chained



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Monster Hunters, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Betrayal, Dimension Travel, Fantasy, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Horror, Magic, Magic-Users, Monster Hunters, Moving On, Protectiveness, Team as Family, Time Travel, Trust, Vampire Hunters, Vampire Turning, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-14
Packaged: 2018-07-15 03:34:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7205510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On another pair of linked Earths in the more magic-orientated end of the multiverse, Cisco Ramon was turned into a dhampir by a man he'd thought was the hunter Harrison Wells and who turned out to be the master vampire Eobard Thawne. This was only the start of his problems, if perhaps the defining one. The multiverse weaves webs of irony, though, and even battered monsters can find and keep a family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Webs of Irony

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure how happy I am with this one. It's more of a Cisco-POV universe sketch than a story, but I figured if I got the general shape of the universe out I could go back later and put some actual stories in if it turned out it worked. Heh. I'm also ... not sure how fair I'm being to everyone, Barry in particular, so apologies in advance for that.

One of the downsides of Cisco's new existence was that it was very hard to escape from the truth of things. The kind of powers his transformation had come with, the visions and the perception of the world and the people around him, they made it really, really hard to ignore certain facets of existence and his own responsibility for them.

And he would have ended up with those powers, wouldn't he? Other dhampirs, vampires too, they ended up with flight or levitation or inhuman speed and agility. Hypnosis, superstrength, shapeshifting. Full blown sorcery, maybe, though that one had been an unusual case, and he still wasn't entirely sure if Thawne had been a vampire first and a sorcerer later or the other way around. Probably the latter, actually, if he had to bet. The way the master vampire had talked about Barry, about the blood curse and the blood echoes and why Barry had to be made the way he was, it'd been the way a sorcerer talked about things. The shape of a spell, a spool spun out through time. The vampire part had been later, Cisco thought. Thawne would have wanted the strength and the power and the immortality of it. He wouldn't have cared about the cost.

Hadn't. He _hadn't_ cared about the cost. He never had. There were more monsters than just vampires out there, and sometimes darker ones. All you needed was the wrong headspace. All you needed to make a monster was just somebody who didn't care, or who cared too much and too wrongly. There were any number of those. All you had to do was give them a bit of power.

Thawne had given him his. Barry too, but Barry had been different. Barry had been a spell, a blood magic to throw back up through time and remake the future as Thawne had wanted it. Barry had been part of a _plan_ , and Thawne had had to make him a certain way because of that. Magic had rules, and Barry's magic was ... something different. Something important. Barry was a vampire made to hunt other vampires, a vampire made for _good_ , because that had done something to the shape of the world around him. A twist on the blood curse that ran through all of them, an alteration to the warp and weft of magic that had made Thawne's future possible. In a lovely twist of irony, one of the most powerful and evil vampires in the world had been forced by circumstances to try and make something _good_. 

And by _lovely_ , of course, Cisco naturally meant _horrible_. Thawne had twisted so many things in pursuit of that goal. He'd done so many things, left so many lives warped and shattered behind him. Cisco knew. He'd been one of them.

He hadn't asked for this. He hadn't even known it was an option. He hadn't known Thawne was _evil_. The man had ... He done it so cleverly. He'd slipped himself inside their lives. They hadn't _known_. And, you know, you'd think they would have. Him and Caitlin anyway. They were _hunters_ , you'd think they'd have noticed a master vampire sneaking into their midst, becoming the head of the very organisation meant to destroy him. Star Libraries had been something good once. Harrison Wells, Dr Wells, he'd been the finest hunter in the state, had set up his organisation to give hunters some place to go, a research facility to back them up. Or he'd ... They'd _thought_ he had. They'd thought it. Maybe the original Harrison Wells really had. They'd never know, now, extra-dimensional comparisons aside. The original Harrison Wells hadn't been the one they got.

How much would you have to want something to _eat a man and merge with his corpse_ to get it, anyway? How desperate would you have to be before that even crossed your mind? Is that what people's brains were like on evil? Was that what _his_ brain was going to turn out like? Because that ... that was just ...

Anyway. So they'd gotten a master vampire from the future disguised as a crippled ex-hunter from the present, who had promptly, and somehow without anyone catching on, managed to build Star Libraries up and then winnow it away to almost nothing again. He'd made a half-empty shell to bring Barry into, to create the circumstances where Barry would become a vampire and become a different _kind_ of vampire and therefore create a blood strain that a couple of centuries in the future would have managed to twist all of magic around it and made ... made Eobard Thawne who he was in the first place. A creature with the desperation and the determination and the patience and the sheer _lack of caring_ to do everything that he'd done, and next time around the loop would do all over again.

And in the middle of that, somewhere in the middle of that, he'd made Cisco what he was. A dhampir, a monster just like him. Like Thawne, not Barry. Because Barry was different, Barry was designed to be good, but Cisco ... that hadn't been why Thawne had wanted him. There hadn't been a plan for Cisco, no great destiny, though Thawne had promised him that he'd build one. It hadn't been about ... prophecies or blood echoes or destiny. It'd been ... It had been some horrible, terrible sort of _sentiment_ on Thawne's part, that was all. It had been love, or some twisted thing the vampire had thought was love. Cisco had never been part of his plan. Thawne had just _wanted_ him. Wanted to keep him, wanted to make him like him.

He wished he could say it was vague, the memory of what had happened. He wished it was foggy, there and gone again, but it wasn't. He remembered it. Something in him had twisted his powers that way, made memory and perception and farsight the things he held most clearly. He remembered what Thawne had done to him. He remembered the strange, terrible sort of love that had been in the man's face as he did it. He remembered what Thawne had wanted him for. Even now, so long after the master vampire had been destroyed. Cisco remembered what Thawne had seen in him.

A bridge up to a rebuilt future. A thing, a monster, a remnant of the person Thawne had been in this time and this place, who would last long enough to see Thawne when he cast himself forward again and re-emerged into the future he had designed. Like a son, he'd said. A son Thawne had made immortal, a son Thawne had given a future, and a son who would spend the centuries in between forgetting why he'd hated it. A son who would slowly slide into evil, and be ready to join with the creature who had made him somewhere further down the line.

It wasn't an unusual goal, apparently. Among monsters of a certain type and power, it was something of a regular thing. Caitlin knew that now too. She'd had a monster of her own, a thing who wore a friendly face to profess his love to her and then try to slide his evil inside of her. Another master vampire, this one _named_ Hunter as well as pretending to be one. Was that a thing? Was that a common thing, or was it just ... just _them_ , just something they drew out in people? Him and Caitlin. Barry as well. Not quite the same way. People wanted Barry to make them and destroy them, to be perfect good or perfect evil. People, evil people, looked at Barry and wanted to _be_ him, to have him be them. People looked at Cisco and Caitlin, they just wanted to _have_ them instead. Some strange, twisted sentiment. Some attachment that neither of them had ever asked for.

At least Hunter hadn't gotten as far as turning Caitlin. At least she wouldn't have to live with that. Not that Thawne had precisely _turned_ Cisco either. Not all the way. Not into a vampire. Thawne had been a sorcerer first and foremost. He'd made a spell of blood, made Cisco into a dhampir, a hybrid thing. Because he'd wanted him to last, to make it all the way up several hundred years. He'd wanted Cisco to be weaker and smaller and easier to hide, and the paranoid, uncaring part of him had wanted to make sure that even with a few centuries under his belt Cisco would never increase enough in power to be a challenge to him. Just in case. Just because all the sentiment in the world would never make Thawne think of anyone but himself first and foremost. He'd wanted Cisco to be weaker than him. He hadn't turned him all the way.

Which on the bright side _had_ made it easier to hide. From everyone, even for the longest time from his friends. He hadn't wanted to ... how did you _tell_ someone something like that, hmm? How did you go up to someone and say "Hi, so I'm a monster now, because the man who pretended to love us got attached to me enough to want to keep me and make me like him?" Thawne had wanted him to be _evil_. How did you go up to somebody and explain that? And he hadn't ... he hadn't needed much blood, benefit of the half-conversion, and Caitlin had always made a little extra of her artificial supplement for Barry. Benefits of being on a team with the world's only good-aligned vampire and the world's smartest doctor and biochemist. It hadn't been hard to swipe a batch here or there. He'd kept himself mostly hidden for a while.

Until a man with Thawne's face. The face Thawne had stolen. Until another of those lovely, lovely ironies that kept cropping up around them.

And Cisco had a point here. This whole ... this whole ramble, this whole long, lovely dwelling on everything that had gone wrong with his life. There was a reason he was thinking all this. His powers. The way he sensed things now. They just ... they made certain things so terribly obvious at times. Threw them up, threw them in his face. When he looked at someone. When he touched them and felt their history from them. They ... made him think of things. Showed him a pattern, _the_ pattern, a hint of the web of irony around them. And in all of this, in everything that had happened, there could be no bigger irony than Harry Wells, and everything he had become to Cisco Ramon. Like Thawne before him, and completely _opposite_ to Thawne before him. There couldn't be a bigger irony in all the world.

There were other worlds out there. Other dimensions, held apart by a thin veil of magic and the stuff of universes. _Very_ thin, in places, and with certain actions made only thinner still. Thawne's blood spell had been such an action. Past and present and future bound up in a line of blood magic, pulled tight into a knot, and then _shattered_ when the man who'd bound them was destroyed. They should have figured that out, maybe, but in Cisco's defence he hadn't always been a future-sensing dhampir with a sorcerer's sensibility. He'd been an engineer once. He'd been the man who built things to make monsters go bye-bye. He still was, and screw Thawne anyway. He hadn't figured it out in time. They'd been a bit too frantic at the time. They'd just needed Thawne dead _that badly_. Eddie. Eddie had needed Thawne dead that badly. A blood spell of a different kind, that. A blood curse, from a relative on the family tree. Eddie had died to see Thawne destroyed. Cisco couldn't blame him. Cisco, even still, was sickly and heartbrokenly grateful to him. He hadn't wanted Thawne's promise to come to pass. He hadn't wanted to see the monster who'd made him centuries down the line.

So they'd torn some holes in the universe. They'd made some holes along the edges of it. Not as much as they could have done, Eddie hadn't shared Thawne's blood quite that closely, but enough. Enough for things to come through. Bad things and good things, bad things pretending to be good, and other things neither one thing or the other. And among them, the best and the worst of them, had been Harrison Wells.

The Harrison Wells of the world beyond the boundary had been a hunter too. Some things were consistent between worlds, it seemed. Harrison Wells was a hunter, Barry Allen was good, Cisco Ramon was a monster. Those were consistent. Other things, not so much. Their Caitlin had been luckier than Harry's, if only by a hair. Cisco for one planned to keep her that way. But. Not the point here. Harry had been a hunter. He'd founded Star Libraries. Those things had been the same. 

Harry hadn't. Whatever they might have expected from Thawne's ruse, the wise, regretful, damaged man he'd masqueraded as, Harry had been nothing like that. Maybe Thawne just hadn't been very good at playing their Harrison. Maybe they'd just been different people. But Harry ... Harry was a _hunter_. One of the old style ones, the fierce, grim, "kill 'em all and god's got nothing to do with it" ones. Harry killed monsters, no if ands or buts, and if it hadn't been for the monster that had come through ahead of him, if it hadn't been for the monster who already had a grip on him, Cisco sometimes wondered if Harry wouldn't have killed them too. Him, Barry. He did wonder sometimes.

But a monster had come through ahead of him. Harry's monster, Caitlin's monster. Hunter Zolomon, the master vampire from Harry's world. A more straight-forward one than Thawne, at least. At first, anyway. No great destinies, no spells to fling himself into the past. Just brutality and cruelty and power, and a certain delight in trickery. A desire to hunt and conquer and destroy, to build hope and then break it again. He'd been Harry's monster long before either of them came through a mystic breach into another world. He'd been Harry's monster in more ways than they'd initially understood, and in hindsight it hadn't really been any wonder that Harry'd been the way he was when they met him. 

Desperation would do that. Desperation made even a hard man willing to work with people he detested. And Harry had been very, very desperate. Enough to work with monsters. Enough even to seek them out.

He'd known what Cisco was. In hindsight, maybe he'd only suspected it based on the monster his own Cisco Ramon had been. But he'd known, anyway. He'd forced it out into the light, not a care in the world for what Cisco might have felt about it. He'd made Cisco tell the others what Thawne had done to him. And, you know. On the one hand, that was probably a good thing in the long run. Cisco'd probably needed that. He couldn't have lied to them forever. But on the other, he'd been so utterly _callous_ about it. Just a hunter bringing a monster out into the light. It'd been so very hard not to hate him for that.

At least the others had taken it well. His team, his ... his _family_. They'd taken it well. Not what Thawne had done to him but ... what he was. Barry had mostly seemed hurt and confused that he hadn't told them at once, but he'd reached out to Cisco immediately, pulled him in and let him know that everything was going to be okay. Joe and Iris had been carefully sympathetic and generally just ... why not? Everything that happened around here, why the hell not? And Caitlin ... 

Caitlin had yelled at him for forty minutes straight. Not for being a monster, but for keeping something that important from _his doctor_. His friend and his doctor. If she'd known, she could have made up a blood supplement for him the way she had for Barry. What had he been doing, _starving himself_? And then she'd figured out where those extra batches of supplement must have been going, the ones she'd thought were lost or stolen or Barry having more of a need than she'd accounted for, and Cisco had hastily arranged to be in a different room. But. She'd been worried about him. What he'd been eating. He'd just told them that he was a monster, and _that_ was what she'd been worried about. She'd been with him through everything, Caitlin. She'd been there from the start, him and her and the man they'd later realise was Thawne.

He was going to keep her safe. He was going to make sure that nothing like what had happened to Harry's Caitlin happened to her. Nothing like Hunter, either. That had been too much, too close. She hadn't been turned. She'd managed to escape being turned. Cisco _swore_ that he was going to keep it that way. Caitlin was never going to end up like ... Like Cisco. Or like Jesse.

Patterns. That was the thing. That was what he kept coming back to. All the patterns, the loops in the blood around them. Thawne had let him see them. Now he couldn't stop. Harrison Wells, Harrison's face, and Harrison's child.

He'd been a hunter. The founder of Star Libraries, the most respected hunter in Central City, in his world maybe. The best there was. And he'd drawn a master vampire because of it. Just like their Wells. He'd pulled one in, and made one hate, and he'd lost everything because of it. Not quite to the extent of their Wells. Not his life, his face, his body. But ... maybe more important things than any of those. Certainly from Harry's point of view. Hunter had taken Jesse. He'd come to them, been willing to work with them, with vampires and dhampirs and hunters corrupted by Thawne, because Hunter had taken _his daughter_ and held her as a blood slave against his obedience.

Cisco had touched it. He'd felt it, felt the horror and the terror and the burning, writhing _desperation_ of the man. His powers. Harry had flinched from him, had tried to avoid him, and only part of it had been a need to keep his secrets. Harry had flinched from _him_ , from a monster like the one who tortured his child. Harry had borne through it anyway. Better than Cisco had. Harry'd been long past the point where fear and love and monsters were enough to turn him aside.

Like Thawne, building a bridge to the future. Just ... not quite. Almost, but not quite. That last little bit, that last lack of conscience, that had been Thawne's alone. For all Harry's face and Harry's fury and Harry's cold, impassioned determination, he just didn't have that last little bit extra.

Which was why he'd come to trust them, slowly and surely. Which was why he'd started to help them, to care about them, to show it here or there. Why he'd let himself be hurt on their behalf. Why he hadn't destroyed Barry. Why he hadn't sold them. Which was why he'd refused obedience, why he'd trusted them instead, why he'd given himself up to them and tried to save his daughter another way.

Which was why they'd been too late. 

Hunter had had a few of Thawne's tricks too. Maybe they were standard for master vampires, like the lack of conscience and the cool names. Eobard Thawne, Hunter Zolomon. And then Barry Allen. No wonder nobody thought he was evil for long. He just didn't have the name for it. But. Yes. Cisco couldn't avoid the thought forever. He couldn't keep from remembering what Hunter had done. Just like Thawne before him. He'd snuck in among them. He'd worn a friendly face. He'd made them _believe_ ...

And he'd been there. When they planned how to save Jesse. He'd been listening, standing right there. He'd known they were coming. So when they got there ...

Hunter could have killed her. If he could have seen what Cisco'd seen since, if he'd realised what Jesse, as bull stubborn as her father, was going to become, he almost definitely would have. But he'd thought that it would hurt Harry more to turn her instead. He'd thought it would be a lovely irony for the great hunter of Central City to have a vampire for a daughter, to have to kill her as he'd killed so many others, or become evil alongside her and betray everything he'd ever stood for instead. 

Jesse hadn't exactly gone along with that. As best she could, she'd tried to stay true to her father. Cisco had ... he'd loved her for that. Instantly, straight away. Jesse had done her literal damnedest not to betray her father or herself. She'd been starving when they'd reached her. She'd been starkly, visibly monstrous, and in desperate need of blood, and desperately, desperately determined not to take any.

He was never going to forget that moment either. Not even by virtue of his powers, it just wasn't something that would ever go away. He hadn't seen himself when Thawne made him, and Barry had been different. Barry hadn't been meant to be evil. But Jesse ... And he'd seen Harry's face. Just like Thawne's, and the complete opposite of Thawne's. A grief and a horror, a determination, and then a desperate, terrible love. For half a second, Cisco had thought that Harry was going to kill her. Harry killed monsters. It was what he did. And if anyone, _anyone_ , could have mustered the desperate, heartless determination to kill someone he loved ... 

But that hadn't been Harry. That had been _Thawne_ , not Harry. Harry's love was a different kind of terrible. Harry was the kind of monster who loved too much, not too little. Harry'd marched right across to his vampire daughter, Harry had rolled up his sleeve, and Harry had offered her his blood. 

"It's okay, honey," he'd said, with her shaking and desperate in his arms, trying to refuse him, trying to keep him safe. "Jesse. It's okay. Don't worry. We'll figure something out. You just take what you need. It's okay. It's all going to be okay."

And he'd looked at Cisco as he'd said it. At Barry, at Cisco. At the other monsters in the room. The monsters he'd come to trust, the monsters he'd refused to sell. He'd looked at them and there'd been ... this weird mix of trust and hope and desperation and pleading in it. Like they could make it okay, or they were proof that okay was possible, or just because he'd needed someone else to back him up. He'd looked at them, and Cisco ...

He couldn't. He couldn't make it okay. He was _going to_. He just ... he had to. Same as Barry. And Cisco wasn't as strong as Barry, wasn't as good as Barry, he'd been made weaker and more monstrous, but he was going to anyway. He was going to keep them safe, Harry and Jesse and Caitlin, Barry and Joe and Iris, everyone else as well. All of them. Thawne was dead. They'd destroyed him. His future was already gone, and Cisco was just ... he was going to keep his family safe. He just was. Screw the monsters anyway. Jesse had told Hunter so, had defied him right up until the end. Cisco wasn't going to do any less with Thawne.

It had taken everything they had to put Hunter down in the end. He'd taken Caitlin. He'd wanted ... Like Thawne had wanted. Well. More romantically than Thawne had wanted, if exactly as twistedly. And they'd almost been too late, as late as they'd been for Jesse, they'd almost not saved her and in the end she'd at least partially saved herself, so maybe they weren't the best at this ... this saving each other thing, but ...

But Hunter was gone. Thawne was gone. They were two master vampires on, and those of them that were left, they were ... a bit more monstrous now, a bit more damaged, but they weren't evil yet. None of them. Not Cisco, not Caitlin, not Harry, not Jesse. Barry wasn't the only good vampire in the world now. Jesse really _was_ as bull stubborn as her father, and her powers had leaned towards agility and strength and _blinding_ speed. Closer to Barry's than Cisco's. She was a vampire _and_ a hunter now, as determined to be true to her father as ever. It scared Harry shitless. She was ten times as powerful as him, and he still spent every waking second terrified for her safety.

They were ... not evil. None of them. Not as monstrous as they might have been, as real monsters had wanted them to be. They made do. They stuck together and held together and pulled each other out of the darker places. Cisco looked at them now. He looked at Harry, particularly. The man with Thawne's face. Or rather, the man whose face Thawne had stolen, and used once upon a time to look at Cisco with love while he killed him and made a monster from him. There was still a terrible love about Harry sometimes. For Cisco, when he looked at Cisco. Not just Jesse now. There was an expression on his face that should have echoed Thawne.

The patterns weren't that simple, though. They didn't just loop, they _mirrored_ , they twisted and turned and echoed each other in ever more ironic ways. Thawne had never seen that. If he had, he would have seen Eddie coming, would have known that his own loop was never going to stay static, never going to remain unbroken. Life was a twisting, turning web of ironies, and nothing ever remained untouched in it for long.

Harry's love wasn't the same as Thawne's. It was terrible too, but not the same way. There were more monsters than vampires out there, and some of them cared too much instead of too little. Maybe ... maybe that was okay. Maybe that was a better kind of monster to be. Maybe, if you didn't have a choice, if you were already a monster and all that was left was to choose which way you were going to go about it ... maybe that wasn't the worst path that you could pick.

He could be the kind of monster that loved, Cisco thought. It wouldn't be hard, not with these people. They were bright and fierce and not evil at all, and he loved them all. Couldn't help it, really. He needed them. He loved them so much. Maybe he'd needed to be a monster just to realise how much. Maybe being made a dhampir by the strange, twisted attachment of an evil man had only driven it home.

Or maybe it had been Harry Wells. Maybe it had been a grim, fierce man from another world, someone who should have destroyed Cisco and hadn't, someone Cisco should have hated and didn't. Maybe it had been watching a man choose to love in spite of monstrosity, and be as fiercely terrible as his vampiric daughter was determinedly good.

Maybe it wasn't any of that. Maybe Cisco was just seeing patterns that weren't there, his powers looping in on themselves and showing him phantoms of a web of irony. 

Maybe, in the end, it didn't matter. 

He was going to love them anyway. He was going to keep them safe. All of them, and all the monsters and the patterns in all the worlds could be damned. Cisco Ramon was a monster now.

And Cisco Ramon was going to keep his family safe.

**Author's Note:**

> Um. I mostly wanted Dhampir!Cisco and Hunter!Harry for this one, so I know I left out a lot of the others. Joe and Iris didn't get much attention, and I left out Ronnie, Martin and Wally entirely. Mostly, I admit, because I'm not sure how to fit the former two yet, though with Wally I'm thinking he just showed up a little later in this pair of universes. I just ... I figured I'd get it out and work out the rest of the problems later -_-;


End file.
